The underestimated Malaysian Chinese: the invisible infrastructure builders of the crypto world

Original Title: "Malaysian Chinese: The Invisible Protagonists of the Crypto World"

Original Authors: Yanz, June, Deep Tide TechFlow

When people talk about the main players in the crypto world, they often think of Silicon Valley geeks, Wall Street capital, investment institutions in Singapore and Hong Kong, and developers from mainland China, but rarely do they turn their attention to Malaysian Chinese.

They have not graced the cover of Fortune like SBF, nor have they been labeled as the "richest Chinese" like Changpeng Zhao.

They rarely accept interviews under the spotlight, and often "stay invisible" on Twitter.

However, when you truly break down the map of the crypto industry, you’ll be surprised to find:

· The world’s largest crypto data platform, CoinGecko, was born in Kuala Lumpur;

· The indispensable Etherscan in the Ethereum ecosystem was built by Malaysian Chinese;

· The bull market’s hot narrative "AI+Crypto" project, Virtuals Protocol, also comes from a Malaysian Chinese team.

· The Solana ecosystem liquidity hub, Jupiter, is from Malaysia.

These projects are not replaceable side players, but have become the infrastructure and the spark for new narratives in the crypto industry.

Without Malaysian Chinese, today’s crypto industry would lose an "eye," a "map," and even a future "path of exploration."

Builders

In 2014, Mt. Gox collapsed, plunging the entire crypto world into darkness. At the most chaotic moment in the market, Bobby Ong and TM Lee founded CoinGecko with just $100 as startup capital.

Source: Fintechnews

One studied economics, the other was a programmer. They met by chance but shared the same judgment: the market urgently needed a transparent and reliable data platform. Thus, CoinGecko was born in the midst of a market crisis.

"We wanted to build a company that could serve everyone in the world," they summarized their original intention years later. Facts have proven this direction was correct. With the Trust Score algorithm and coverage of edge markets, CoinGecko quickly became a must-use tool for investors every day. Ten years on, it has recorded over 17,000 tokens, and its API is widely used by Trezor, Metamask, and others.

At the same time, another young Malaysian, Matthew Tan, was paying attention to Ethereum. He once operated a blockchain search engine called Blockscan. When Ethereum smart contracts emerged, he keenly spotted a key issue almost everyone else ignored: at that time, block explorers could only handle simple peer-to-peer transactions and were completely unable to cope with the complexity brought by smart contracts.

So, he almost bet everything to transform Blockscan into Etherscan.

"This is no longer just value transfer from point A to point B. There’s so much more that needs to be displayed by a search engine."

He decisively upgraded the early blockchain search engine Blockscan, which had been running for two years, into Etherscan, redesigning the underlying architecture specifically for the complexity of smart contracts.

Today, Etherscan has evolved from a simple tool into the de facto standard of the Ethereum ecosystem, indispensable to almost every Ethereum user. With the advent of the multi-chain era, the successive launches of BscScan, PolygonScan, ArbiScan, and other products have further cemented this Malaysian Chinese’s dominance in the blockchain explorer field.

The timeline moves to 2021. The afterglow of DeFi Summer still lingers, and a young man named TN Lee set his sights on an even more complex problem: How can yields become more predictable and tradable?

With a background in computer science and a deep understanding of financial derivatives, he proposed what seemed like a crazy concept at the time: yield tokenization. He separated future yields into principal tokens (PT) and yield tokens (YT), allowing users to trade these two parts independently.

This seemingly simple innovation actually took years, and in 2021, Pendle Protocol burst onto the scene.

Also in 2021, young developer Siong turned his attention to Solana. He saw its high-performance potential, but also the challenges of fragmented liquidity and excessive slippage. So, he and his team built Jupiter, a trading aggregator that automatically finds the optimal path through smart routing algorithms.

Starting from obscurity, by 2024 both Pendle and Jupiter had succeeded in their respective ecosystems. Pendle became a leading DeFi protocol with a total value locked (TVL) exceeding $10 billion, while Jupiter became the liquidity hub of the Solana ecosystem, with daily trading volumes often surpassing $1 billion and its token’s total market cap once breaking the $10 billion mark.

The entrepreneurial stories didn’t end there. In 2024, Weekee Tiew, who once worked at Boston Consulting Group, turned his attention to AI. He had founded the gaming guild PathDAO, which was valued at $600 million, but fell to the bottom during the bear market, struggling to find a way forward. In 2024, he pivoted to launch Virtuals Protocol, focusing on the creation and issuance of AI agents.

Source: LinkedIn

The token $VIRTUAL of Virtuals Protocol reached a new high of over $4.5 billion in market cap in January 2025, becoming one of the most representative projects in the intersection of AI and Crypto.

It wasn’t until his "overnight success" and Weekee Tiew appeared on numerous podcasts that people were surprised to discover this was a Malaysian project.

Moreover, Pendle, Jupiter, Aevo, and Drift also all come from Malaysia.

On Twitter, there seems to be a consensus: this cycle is a bull market for Malaysian entrepreneurs.

Bridge Builders

"I have many Malaysian friends who rarely speak on social platforms."

Compared to famous entrepreneurs, more Malaysian Chinese in the crypto industry are like veins scattered throughout the industry, connecting its flexible limbs. Their roles, like veins, link markets from different cultural backgrounds.

Malaysian Chinese are natural bridge builders.

Cova, a Malaysian Chinese, has been in the crypto industry for five years. As she interacted with practitioners from all over the world, she truly realized the unique advantages of Malaysian Chinese in the industry.

"I think Malaysian Chinese are natural customer service. Normally, a Malaysian Chinese can speak at least three languages—not counting dialects—Chinese, Malay, and English. Some even add Japanese and Korean."

From kindergarten, they live in an environment interwoven with Chinese, English, and Malay. Add to that each person’s different background, plus Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka... This "multi-threaded" language ability allows them to thrive in teams—they can catch up with Western trends, take care of the Southeast Asian market, collaborate with international teams, and connect with clients from various countries.

This linguistic talent is especially valuable in the crypto world. Virtuals Protocol founder Weekee Tiew can showcase how Virtuals truly integrates AI and Crypto to Western audiences on English podcasts, and also directly share Virtuals’ grand vision with Chinese users at offline events. This multilingual ability enables him to serve developer communities from different cultural backgrounds simultaneously.

At the intersection of cultures, Cova also believes Malaysian Chinese and Singaporeans integrate faster.

"For example, projects promoted by Americans or their meme culture, as well as the cultures of some niche countries, Malaysian Chinese and Singaporeans can integrate and understand them particularly quickly."

The cultural DNA of Malaysian Chinese is like a master key, opening the doors to multiple international markets.

However, this innate multilingual advantage also brings an unexpected side effect: identity ambiguity.

Whenever Malaysian Chinese run their own Twitter accounts or launch crypto projects, they face a crucial decision: should they use English or Chinese as their main communication medium? This choice often determines the audience and market they can reach.

More importantly, to gain wider recognition and acceptance in the global market, many Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs intentionally or unintentionally downplay their regional label. They want their products to be seen as "international" solutions, not projects from a specific country.

This strategy is often wise in business, but it also leads to a regrettable result: most users don’t know these world-changing products actually come from Malaysia.

When you use Etherscan to check Ethereum transactions, you probably wouldn’t think it’s the work of a Malaysian Chinese team; when you trade tokens on Jupiter or study Pendle’s yield strategies, you’re more likely to assume it’s the masterpiece of some Western elite team.

Their "invisible" identity precisely illustrates the adaptability of Malaysian Chinese in a globalized context, but also reflects their complex situation regarding identity and market positioning.

Behind this identity ambiguity lies a deeper issue: brain drain.

Many Malaysian Chinese, in pursuit of success, ultimately choose to leave their homeland. This fertile land continues to nurture wave after wave of talent, but due to various realities—be it policy environment, market size, or level of internationalization—these talents are often forced to flow to overseas markets.

They shine on the global stage, yet few know their true origins. This "invisible success" demonstrates the adaptability of Malaysian Chinese in a globalized context, but is also the price this group pays in the process of globalization.

They are the best bridge builders, yet also the builders whose identities are most easily forgotten.

Perception Changers

Serious, down-to-earth, content—these are common traits among most Malaysian Chinese. They rarely boast about their achievements on social media, preferring to let solid work speak for itself.

This low-key work ethic is deeply connected to their historical experiences.

During the late Qing "Nanyang migration," Chinese people moved from southeastern China to the Malay Peninsula. Facing a completely unfamiliar environment and culture, they could only rely on diligence and wisdom to find a foothold in the British colonial economic system. However, even after achieving business success through hard work, the colonial government’s "divide and rule" policy always excluded Chinese from political power.

After Malaysia’s independence in 1957, the political ideology of "Malay supremacy" and the subsequent New Economic Policy further restricted Chinese development opportunities in education, employment, and business through a quota system. University admissions were limited, government jobs had thresholds, and even starting a business faced various policy barriers.

This long-term institutional pressure shaped the unique survival philosophy of Malaysian Chinese: Since they can’t change the big environment, they focus on doing what they can control well. They learned to survive in the cracks, to prove their value with strength, and to maintain resilience in adversity.

"Malaysian Chinese have always been suppressed by policy, so most people just keep their heads down and work, as long as they make money."

This resilience, cultivated by historical experience, has instead become a unique advantage in the challenging crypto industry. When the market crashes, they don’t panic; when projects encounter difficulties, they find solutions instead of complaining; when opportunities arise, they quietly seize them rather than making a fuss...

However, focusing on work, profiting while chasing dreams, and proving strength through project success to change the outside world’s stereotypes of Malaysian Chinese is not a smooth process.

The reputation of early Malaysian crypto projects was not optimistic, with many suspected of market manipulation and running pyramid schemes. A more intuitive example is that Cova said Malaysian Chinese are easily prejudged by partners as "scammy" project teams, and this bias creates extra trust costs for building business.

This negative impression has historical roots.

Malaysia’s early lack of fintech regulation did create many gray areas, and some criminals exploited regulatory loopholes for illegal fundraising and scams. Many projects under the banner of "blockchain innovation" repeatedly fleeced investors, not only harming their interests but also casting a shadow over Malaysia’s tech startup ecosystem.

Worse, these negative cases often spread faster and wider than positive stories. When people hear "Malaysian project," their first reaction may not be technological innovation, but "beware of being scammed." This stereotype has become an invisible barrier that all Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs must face.

But times are changing. The global success of projects like CoinGecko, Etherscan, Pendle, Jupiter, and Virtuals Protocol is putting high-quality Malaysian projects in the international spotlight, gradually improving global users’ perception of Malaysian tech projects.

"I think these down-to-earth builders have proven themselves over two or three bull cycles—not as the stereotypical pyramid-scheme project teams, but as international big projects from the start," said one Malaysian Chinese practitioner.

Across cycles, this shadow army has always been doing its own thing in the industry. Building, bridging, realizing dreams... until they are seen, until they are recognized, or "as long as they make money."